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Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell

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Author: Illiad

I'm very familiar with the Nutshell books, what my pal Van
Wolverton calls "propellerhead books," or books for the nerds among
us. This is appropriate because nerds appreciate brevity. On the
other hand, Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell appreciates
levity.

I was guessing that maybe the book was about crazy computer
scientists. And, in a way, it is! But more accurately, Evil
Geniuses in a Nutshell is a collection of the User
Friendly cartoon strips, originally published on the Internet
at http://www.userfriendly.org/. The fuzzy-headed-with-feet guy on
the book's cover is Dust Puppy, the strip's mascot (who is
apparently very popular among the propellerheads; a copy of him
secretly appears in the game Quake III). Other characters, familiar
to anyone who works in high tech, also appear in the comic strip,
as well as various foreign agents, domestic spies, and what
possibly could be parodies of well-known computer geeks.

The book is funny--the only Nutshell book I've ever laughed at.
The illustrations were obviously done on a computer in some bitmap
graphics application, but they aren't bad (and don't tell me
they're stupid unless you've tried it; it is hard). The
humor is often subtle, but I occasionally found myself bursting out
laughing. Like Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbes, or even Married with
Children, it takes a while to soak in the humor, but then it
becomes addictive.

I recommend Evil Geniuses in a Nutshell if for no other
reason than so you can have a truly funny computer book on your
shelf. (Or in the WC, which is where I read it.) There is a
follow-on called User Friendly the comic strip, also from
O'Reilly. The more you're into technical things, the more you'll
appreciate it. --Dan Gookin